Sellars And Wittgenstein On Psychological Ascriptions

 

Here are two quotes from Wilfred Sellars and Ludwig Wittgenstein:

“The essential point is that in characterizing an episode or a state as that of

knowing, we are not giving an empirical description of that episode or state; we

are placing it in the logical space of reasons, of justifying and being able to

justify what one says.” - Wilfred Sellars 

“But it is clear that A believes that p, A thinks p, A says p, are of the form “‘p' says p”: And here we have no co-ordination of a fact and an object, but a co-ordination of facts by means of a co-ordination of their objects.” - Ludwig Wittgenstein 

In the quotes above, Sellars and Wittgenstein both suggest that, in our use of certain psychological ascriptions, we are doing something other than providing empirical descriptions of mental states such as “belief” or “knowledge”. According to Wittgenstein, we are “co-ordinating” the elements of one fact (perhaps a fact involving certain signs) with the elements of another fact (perhaps some environmental fact). According to Sellars, we are “placing” an episode or state within the “logical space of reasons”. 

If Sellars and Wittgenstein are correct, then when we say that someone thinks or knows something, we are not placing that subject and their thought within nature. In other words, we are not making a claim about how things are with them and their thought in the way that we might make a claim about, for example, the color of a basketball. Rather, we are assigning a certain normative status to the elements of reality that constitute their assertion or belief in something like the way an umpire might assign a baseball swing a normative status by calling “strike”. 

What makes a view of this sort philosophically interesting is the way it can help to explain the claim that judgement is, in some important sense, self-conscious. 

It has sometimes been said that judgement is self-conscious in the following sense: Thinking “P” is identical to thinking “I think that P”. If judgement is self-conscious, there is no such thing as believing something without, thereby, believing that one believes it. This sort of idea precludes the possibility of a thinker who is, somehow, unaware of what it is that they think. 

But the idea that judgement is self-conscious can be confusing. It certainly seems like the fact that a car is red is different from the fact that I think a car is red. But if this is so, how can my judgement about a car be the same as my judgment about one of my beliefs? This would seem to involve a single belief that is somehow about two distinct facts and that is difficult to understand. In order to address this confusion, we need to unpack how Sellars and Wittgenstein provide a way of seeing how a judgment can be self-conscious without being a judgment about two different facts. 

As noted above, Wittgenstein and Sellars hold that at least some of our psychological ascriptions do not involve empirical descriptions of mental states. Rather, they involve assigning a normative status to certain episodes or objects. If we accept this sort of view, then thinking “P” and “I think that P” does not need to imply that we are thinking about two separate facts. Instead, thinking “P” involves representing the fact that P while thinking “I think that P” involves assigning a normative status to something in the world, by virtue of which, it represents the fact that P. When we recognize that thinking “I think that P” does not require representing a distinct content, we can avoid the confusion associated with self-conscious judgement that was presented above: We can say that the act of representing P is one and the same as the act of assigning a certain normative status to that representation. 

These considerations do not establish that judgment is actually self-conscious. However, they do suggest that one popular source of resistance to that idea can be adequately addressed.